It may be that the chancellor's autumn statement is a pivotal moment in British social history. Since the Beveridge report of 1942, British society has developed and matured its understanding of the need for social insurance. We know that everyone experiences a crisis at some point in their life and we also know that together we can help people survive those shocks and get back on their feet.

In the last 60 years, this understanding has found institutional expression in the NHS, national insurance, state pensions and welfare. Clunky and bureaucratic as those systems may be, they have been and still are a key expression of the social contract that holds us all together.

In the midst of the latest round of gloomy figures and revised predictions of growth, we might easily miss the fact that the chancellor's further £3.7bn cuts to the welfare bill are an attempt to change our understanding of that social contract.

The chancellor announced that while some benefits would be uprated by 5.2% next year, in line with inflation, jobseekers' allowance, income support, housing allowance and employment support allowance would increase by just 1%, representing a cut in real terms. These cuts are clearly aimed at the unemployed and those in work but on low incomes.

The idea is to make work pay. And yet the latest figures show that 60% of people living in poverty are working, while some 6.4 million people in the UK are underemployed and cannot find the work they want (Joseph Rowntree Foundation 2012). Work is not paying.

With little opportunity for sustainable employment, ever decreasing social support and reduced access to housing, millions of people will almost certainly find themselves excluded from the mainstream and effectively placed outside the social contract that holds us all together.

If so, it is a dangerous game. I was out in communities in Middlesbrough and Bradford with development managers from Church Urban Fund, the Church of England charity I chair. The effect of these cuts is not a renewed motivation or sense of purpose, but, rather, a greater sense of hopelessness and a palpable fear for the future.

We are mobilising in the churches. We have been setting up food banks, debt advice centres, support services for destitute asylum seekers and programmes for the young, jobless poor. Yet reduced provision in public services, the effects of the recession and the cuts in benefits already in place mean that the work we do in communities is coming under increasing strain.

Yet the real challenge is to see through myriad figures of public spending, growth predictions, GDP and national debt, to see the social impact of such targeted welfare cuts. As we require families to live with increasing uncertainty about the future, struggling through on ever falling income, we corrode the idea that "we're all in this together".

If we want to preserve our society and the social bonds that tie us together, we need to help people survive shocks and provide them with a level of income at which they can preserve their dignity. We must hold firm to the Beveridge principle that our social insurance system should provide a minimum standard of living "below which no one should be allowed to fall".

At Church Urban Fund, we are developing the Together Network, working with dioceses around the country to develop a creative response to poverty in England. We seek to build a movement of people who are committed to supporting those in poverty, strengthening our communities and affirming our social bonds.